Is Trump’s support slipping?

Multiple polls over the past week have held bad news for the president.

More often than is probably healthy, I check out the FiveThir-tyEight average of President Trump’s approval ratings. For months, it barely budged — hovering right around 42 percent for almost the entire summer. Over the past week, however, it has shifted.

Thanks to several negative polls for Trump — from YouGov, Emerson College, Investor’s Business Daily and the ABC/Washington Post collaboration — his approval rating has dropped. The FiveThirtyEight average is designed to be cautious, taking into account multiple polls, and it doesn’t tend to move sharply. Still, the share of Americans giving him positive ratings has fallen noticeably if modestly, to 40.1 percent. It is Trump’s worst mark since April.

By comparison, 54.1 percent of Americans disapprove of his performance. Those aren’t the sort of ratings that help a president’s political party win elections.

Now, whenever I come across data that’s consistent with my rooting interests, I try to view it with an extra degree of skepticism. And there are multiple reasons to doubt the mini-trend in Trump approval.

One, it is indeed a mini-trend, lasting only a few days, and may turn out to be just a blip. Two, Trump’s supporters — who tend to be older and white — have a history of voting at higher rates in midterm elections than Trump’s critics do. Three, some Americans who disapprove of Trump may still vote for congressional candidates from his party. Four, Democrats need to win the popular vote in the midterm elections by a lot to take control of the House.

Yet the drop in Trump’s standing has been significant enough — showing up across several polls — to deserve some attention.

John Merline of Investor’s Business Daily writes: “The drop in Trump’s approval rating comes after a spate of bad news, including the conviction of his former campaign chairman on eight counts of fraud and a guilty plea on campaign finance charges by Trump’s former lawyer, which sparked a torrent of impeachment talk. Trump also caught flak for his handling of Sen. John McCain’s passing.”

Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post — in a piece headlined “Maybe Trump’s incredible poll drop is real” — added another possible explanation: the trade disputes he has started. Those disputes, she argues, “are also causing pain in rural America.”

Ahmed Baba of Rantt Media notes that Trump’s strong approval among Republicans may be slipping ever so slightly. More than 30 percent of Republicans support Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump.

And Gary Langer of ABC News points out that Trump has “the lowest approval rating for a president heading into his first midterms in polling dating to 1954.”

Is all of this a trend or a blip? I’ll let you know if other meaningful evidence emerges over the next couple of weeks.